Rise of Tech Streamers

How to stay up to date with tech community trends remotely

One of the things you may lose out on working in a remote environment is an understanding of what is happening in the wider tech community, such as trends around new tools and frameworks. So how do we benefit from remote working but make sure we don’t lose this…

Sitting around other engineers and taking in conversations by osmosis often means you pick up a lot of information. You can read articles, you can read the stack overflow report and go to local meetups, but nothing has the frequency and depth of just being surrounded by a community of engineers every day. You also learn a lot by just seeing how people code, such as ways they might have their tooling setup, etc.

Personally, I have found that tech streamers such as Primagen and Theo, alongside YouTubers like Fireship, have really filled in that gap. I interview a lot of people, and this is a common answer that is coming up now when I ask about how people stay up to date.

Top Picks

I put together this list of my favourite streamers and YouTubers in the tech space for a friend of mine and thought I would share it here (in no particular order):

Primagen: Reads through and comments on a lot of articles about what is happening in the industry and gets viewpoints from his chat that can be really interesting. More for the backend side of things.

Theo: Helps me stay in touch with front-end/web trends, especially around React and TypeScript.

Matt Pocock: He does a lot of really great videos about TypeScript in depth.

Pirate Software: Has exploded through YouTube shorts. Talks mostly about game development.

Fireship: Short 100-second videos about lots of different technologies and tech news. I always check it out when I see a new tech come up to get an instant basic understanding of what it is.

John Hammond: All about cybersecurity and runs capture the flag events.

Techno Tim: More of the infrastructure/homelab side of things. Does a lot with k8s, etc.

Summary

Another impact that streamers and YouTubers have is the way we learn. People are less interested in going to a course, say, in a room for a week on end, when they can sit in their own environment, with their own setup and click pause. They are also less interested in video training suites when they can find the people they learn best with and stick with them.

Obviously, YouTubers, podcasts, and people showing off what they do when it comes to software development are nothing new. Even when I first started (nearly two decades ago), I was an avid listener of Scott Hanselman, but the streaming aspect and ability to ask questions, and the discord channels that go with them to create communities are definitely on the rise.